AUTHOR: Harrison Weber

I haven’t asked for a lot from Fitbit over the years. Really only one thing. I would like another Pebble—a gorgeous smartwatch that lasts for days, has a healthy selection of apps, and isn’t sized to fit the wrist of a seven foot tall, 300-pound football player. Finally, I think, Fitbit might be giving me what I wanted. Read More >>

We might not just get a new iPhone X this autumn. Apple reportedly has two additional new devices planned: A big phablet that borrows design elements from the iPhone X and might be called the iPhone X Plus, and a cheaper phone that sacrifices some of the iPhone X’s premium features to make it more affordable, according to Bloomberg. Read More >>

This week, we finally got our first hands-on look at the long-promised “Ocean Depths” colour scheme of the Essential phone. Despite looking very much green in promotional photos, however, the device now appears quite blue. So which is it? And why has this question driven me to the brink of madness? Read More >>

It only took one day—one freaking day!!—for someone to capitalise on the bizarre news that Apple’s £330 HomePod, the speaker that isn’t so smart but sounds pretty great, might wreck your wood furniture. That someone is gadget accessories maker Pad and Quill and we are just as blown away/totally unsurprised as you are. Read More >>

In a strangely transcendental moment during Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, CEO and quinquagenarian Tim Cook told the company’s investors today that he is “hoping to be alive to see the elimination of money.” Read More >>

Zurich designer Florian Schulz has reimagined Twitter not as a mind-numbing torrent of breaking news, GIFs, and nazis, but as something else he calls a “social network.” We’re not too sure about this “social network” idea, but the results are pretty intriguing, at least in an experimental way. Read More >>

After the incessant mind-numbing news cycle and a distressing car accident, I dramatically deleted Twitter from my phone early last year, giving my brain a break from the creeping sense of exhaustion that was building up over the holidays. And when I finally did it, a fellow Twitter user offered a prescient, super obvious warning: “Make sure you don’t just trade addictions,” they said. Don’t just swap one bad behaviour for another. Right, of course I won’t. I wouldn’t! Read More >>

When Hawaii accidentally terrified residents earlier this month with a push notification about an imminent “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT,” the Internet seemed to cry out in unison: Okay, who pushed the wrong button? Read More >>

If you use Google’s products, there’s a good chance the company already has a copy of your credit card details stored somewhere—in your Chrome browser’s autofill settings, gathering dust in a Google Wallet, or inside Android Pay. But soon, “over the coming weeks,” Google says it will merge the various ways it gobbles up this information under a new umbrella called Google Pay. Read More >>

Late last year, the CEO of Intel sold millions of dollars in company stock, as CEOs often do. The sale appears to have occurred while developers were reportedly rushing to fix a major security flaw affecting Intel processors made in the last decade. Read More >>

Yesterday Uber, the biggest ride-sharing company in much of the world, got its hands on even more money by selling up to 20 per cent of itself to Softbank and other investors in exchange for a giant sack of cash. But that massive investment come with a catch. In order to raise more money, Uber sold a chunk of itself at a lower price than investors were once willing to pay. And with that, the company’s estimated worth suddenly looks incredibly different. It’s dropped by more than $20 billion (£15 billion), according to a Wall Street Journal report. Read More >>

As 2017 comes to a close, it’s as good a time as any to reflect on how the year went for some of the most attention-grabbing tech companies, ordered here conveniently from most screwed to least screwed. Read More >>

Sometimes it feels like we’re inching closer to a future like the movie Her, where humans spend their time wandering around, constantly chatting to their own personal AI assistants. Today, services like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are getting better at responding to some types of requests, but because they can misunderstand questions and aren’t cognisant of their surroundings, they’re often super awkward to use in public spaces around other people. But a patent filed by Apple and made public today suggests Siri may someday detect when you’re whispering at it, and in turn know when to whisper back. Read More >>